Podcast
Case Dismissed! Every Medical Defendant’s Dream Still Holds Some Nightmares
Oct 13, 2025

“I was elated that the suit was dropped. But all of the angst still happens. I took two weeks off from work and we had done all our last-minute prep. ”
Marc Grella, MD
General Pediatrician
Today, the experience of being a medical malpractice defendant is different for every clinician. But knowing what to expect can help enormously. On today’s podcast we have the privilege of hearing from a physician defendant who went through all the ups and downs of defending himself against charges of negligence before the unexpected happened. His patient dropped the case just before trial.
It hardly ever happens, even though that’s what every defendant hopes for. In the end, a defendant doctor or nurse will experience all of the hardship and pain of being sued regardless of the case outcome. And it is possible that some new understanding can also result.
Dr. Mark Grella is a pediatrician at Mass General for Children in Boston. He was a named defendant in a professional liability suit that was dismissed by the patient earlier this year.
CRICO: Dr. Grella, thank you for joining us.
Marc Grella: Thank you for having me.
CRICO: Can you give us a little bit more background on yourself, and what the clinical focus is for what you do today?
Marc Grella: Sure I’m a general pediatrician. I work in a group practice in a medium sized practice in Boston. I see patients from birth till about age 22. And I work with colleagues who also do the same. Some of us work full time. Some of us work part time.
CRICO: Ok, and as context for this case, maybe you can tell us a little bit about about the case that you were involved in.
Marc Grella: Sure. So in 2017, I saw a patient on a Saturday morning for a sick visit. It was a 12-month-old, who had been seen twice prior to my appointment with him in the past few days and for all of the appointments the chief complaint was essentially fever. There was also some rash that had been present briefly, but basically it was an on and off fever, for what the parents had said was about 10 or 12 days total.
At the time I saw him there was no fever. The rash that had also been reported and recorded on film was also resolved. The patient looked very well, very interactive, had normal vital signs and sort of had essentially a normal exam.
CRICO: What was your reaction when you learned there was a subsequent hospitalization and then a diagnosis of sepsis.
Marc Grella: Yes. So the day after I saw the patient, he presented for a fourth time to a medical facility, also managed by my hospital corporation. At that point he appeared quite sick. He was transported to my hospital’s emergency department, and shortly after was admitted to the intensive care unit, the pediatric intensive care unit. I found out about this the following day, which was a Monday, and I was shocked, based on my evaluation of him, as well as the records I had reviewed.
CRICO: Do you remember—most people do—do you remember when and how you learned that there was going to be some legal action, a malpractice suit.
Marc Grella: Yes. Well, after the patient was hospitalized, my colleague, who was his primary care pediatrician, did keep me informed. I learned that in addition to group A streptococcal sepsis, he eventually needed mechanical intubation and ventilation. He needed an awful lot of support of his blood pressure. He had lots of specialists consulting on him. He spent about a month in the intensive care unit. So he was very, very, very sick.
I found out about the suit being filed in April of the following year. So 11 months after I had seen the patient. It came as a registered letter, signature required to prove that I had received it, delivered to my home. And I had learned after his discharge from the hospital that things were going well. So I guess I wasn’t shocked, based on the fact that we had a prolonged, intensive care unit stay, but I think one is never prepared for this to happen.
CRICO: Can you say more about that?
Marc Grella: Sure. So in in my mind I had done everything right. I saw a patient who appeared well. I did a full evaluation. He had been seen several times before by other people who had the same impression. Fevers are a very common pediatric diagnosis, and in general, when one has a fever and nothing else, the presumption is this is probably a viral infection which will resolve on its own after some amount of time.
So. I was, of course, very, very sorry that anything happened to this child, but I didn’t feel that it was something I had missed. I think that in the end it wound up being a coincidence of time that was really unfortunate for everyone involved.
CRICO: What was your initial concern, though? And did that change over time?
Marc Grella: I think my initial concern was just that I’d never been named in a suit before, or since. I, of course, was concerned that I would be thought of badly as someone who had missed a diagnosis. I think everyone has that feeling. And then, of course you know, the point of a suit is not to make someone feel badly, but in the end medical malpractice suits are almost always designed to obtain some money from that person or that person’s malpractice carrier. So, of course, there was the malpractice damages concern for me as well.
CRICO: Did you have to do a deposition?
Marc Grella: Yes, I was deposed maybe a month or two before the trial was supposed to start.
CRICO: Okay. And what was that like?
Marc Grella: I probably didn’t sleep as much in the week or a couple of weeks before, as I would have liked to. So again it was a lot of anxiety that it had produced. And I had been thinking about this case, probably not every day for years, but probably most days. Because again, you know, I work very hard. I work lots. My wife and I have both been working for 30 years and saving money very consistently. And to think that if something that I did correctly wound up still being interpreted by someone else as incorrectly and costing us maybe our retirement money, I could not really come to, yeah, I couldn’t get at peace with that. It just seemed wrong to me.
And I think a lot of people are not really aware of the risk they may be at, even if they have a great employer with great liability insurance. I mean, nothing is ultimate.
CRICO: Were you ever offered any emotional support services along the way.
Marc Grella: I shared with my lawyer at one point that I thought about the case almost every day. I knew that one is not supposed to be discussing a case with one’s co-defendants, so I did not. I do know that one of my co-defendants really wasn’t worried at all about this, and said so quite frequently that she just felt that, you know suits most often get filed because someone’s looking for money, even when there’s no one at fault. And although I believe no one was at fault in this case, I don’t believe that outcomes were always necessarily just.
And so I felt I was the only one in the room worrying about this. But I’ve also consulted on medical legal cases before, and I’ve seen judgments go the wrong way, and I think everyone should be concerned if they’re named in a suit, even if you feel you’ve done everything right.
CRICO: Well, the language alone goes at your very core as a physician, they make it out to be that you were not a good doctor.
Marc Grella: Oh, yes, and I think that malpractice firms who do this as a matter of course, as a routine, commonly use very inflammatory language. You know, not negligent, but grossly negligent, and, you know, not just disregarded, but ignored. And you know it’s made to seem like you walked in the room, walked out, sent a bill in, and that was the end of the story.
So I was probably most affected by this. My partner seemed not to be. I know that the pediatric resident who saw the patient with my partner had expressed views of maybe leaving medicine based on her experience after less than a year as a doctor, having been named in a suit. Again, everyone felt they had done everything right. And in the end the suit was dismissed by the plaintiff and so we all felt that in in our own ways that this should never have happened. But I seemed to be the only one losing sleep.
CRICO: Did you want a trial in some ways?
Marc Grella: I don’t think anyone wants a trial. I don’t think it would have been vindicating for me. I think that I, again, followed the science. I think I did everything correctly, but knowing how trials can be, and knowing how stressful they are, and knowing that it might not have gone in the way I would have preferred, I don’t think I wanted a trial. It would have been fine with me if my two co-defendants wanted to settle the case, and it was taken out of my hands because it was settled. That would have been fine with me, I suppose, because in the end it wouldn’t have been me asking to be removed, but I was certainly willing to go ahead with the trial, because my co-defendants were.
CRICO: So at some point, you learned that you would be dropped from the case. Can you explain what dismissal means, and how you reacted to what most people would think is good news, kind of what every defendant hopes for.
Marc Grella: Oh, I was very happy. I was elated, you know. It was a large, large burden taken off of me. You know it didn’t prevent all of the trial prep from happening. The trial was dropped several days before it was supposed to start, so the suit was dropped at the very last minute.
I was elated that the suit was dropped. All of the angst still happens. All the prep still happened. I took two weeks off from work because I was told that a trial could take up to weeks and we had done all our last-minute prep. And then at the very last second, it was dropped. And I presume that’s because the plaintiff was hoping that our side would come to them and ask for a settlement. I am told that that firm does this not infrequently. But who knows this in advance, and who has confidence in that happening? No one.
CRICO: So whether or not your case goes all the way to trial, like you said, you experienced all of the preparation and the and the challenge that it presents to your work and your home life, everything. What advice do you have for new defendants in a medical malpractice claim? How do they make their own experience more constructive and not sort of the worst thing that that ever happened to them?
Marc Grella: I think they should seek the counsel of someone who’s been in a similar situation. I do think that employers or malpractice liability companies should facilitate that. I think that there should be a panel of people, a group of people who volunteer to meet with people. Not to give them legal advice, but just to lend an ear to let people know that there’s a lot to find out about the malpractice process. And to give any personal advice that might be asked. I think that I probably could have learned a lot from someone who had been through the process before me. You know I have a very, very large employer. Mass General employs tens of thousands of people. I’m sure there are thousands of doctors who have been through malpractice suits, so I’m sure that there are lots of people who, if asked, would be happy to speak to someone, or have coffee with someone and talk about their process, and you know how it worked for them. I would be the first to stand up and volunteer to do that myself.
CRICO: Thank you. Any other advice that you have for defendants in terms of getting through their day-to-day practice, coping skills, anything you would advise for defendants just undergoing this journey?
Marc Grella: Well, you’re not supposed to talk to anyone about lawsuits, at least the facts of the suit. So other than one’s spouse, which is a special case, you’re really not allowed to talk to people. I guess one can break that rule. But I wouldn’t suggest it. I do think it helps to have someone you can talk to, to explain your emotional distress, and sometimes that’s a friend. Sometimes it’s a spouse.
One might think it should be your, you know, the head of your practice, or someone else at the hospital. I will tell you that that didn’t happen in my case. Nobody was putting up the hand to sort of say, let’s just talk about how you’re dealing with things, you know. Do you need some time? Do you need to take a couple of long weekends; how can we help?
And I think with malpractice, it’s like a dirty little secret. Even in the end if you’ve done everything correctly, even in the end, if you’re dismissed or you go to trial and you win, no one likes talking about this. Everyone’s aware of it, from the head of your department on down, everyone’s aware. But it’s not discussed. And I do think just like money in medicine, I think people are afraid to talk about things where they’re under the impression you shouldn’t talk about some things, and I think you absolutely should.
CRICO: And it sounds like there’s more for colleagues to do in that space.
Marc Grella: Right, and I’m not faulting my colleagues. I just think that in the entire line, from a department head on down. It would have been fairly easy for someone just to do some check-ins once in a while about, are you clinically depressed? Are you thinking of leaving medicine? Are you thinking of, you know, running away to, you know Haiti to live in exile for the next 35 years? I think that it would help everyone if there was a better read on how people coped.
CRICO: Yeah. What do you think you learned about yourself and take with you into your practice from all of this.
Marc Grella: I learned the value of having a spouse who is willing and able to listen, and supportive. Exercise can be very, very helpful. I think everyone has their own coping mechanisms of ways of dealing with stress. Sometimes it’s just taking time off. Sometimes it’s maybe taking a step back from practice for a while.
But I do think that no one’s really prepared for this, because no one tells you to be prepared. Many people get sued in the course of their career, and I think very few people are really ready for it.
CRICO: Indeed. Thank you so much for sharing this extraordinary experience.
Dr. Mark Grella is a pediatrician at Mass General for Children in Boston. He was a named defendant in a professional liability suit that was dismissed by the patient earlier this year, after a six-year ordeal.
I’m Tom Augello for Safety Net.
Commentators
- Marc Grella, MD
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